Make Me a Perfect Match
by SCWLC
Summary: The internet, when it crosses paths with overbearing, matchmaking parents, is a terrible thing.


Title: Make Me a Perfect Match  
Author: SCWLC  
Disclaimer: I'm making no money and I own nothing you recognise, so really, no point in suing.  
Summary: The internet, when it crosses paths with overbearing, matchmaking parents, is a terrible thing.  
Rating: G  
AN: So . . . I try to be funny sometimes.

* * *

It was horrible.

No. It was so far past horrible it was four countries and three universes to the left as Connor would say.

"Mum. Please. Just because I'm single doesn't mean you have to join that . . . website," Stephen pleaded.

Doreen Hart fixed her son with a glare. "I'm not asking you to get me grandchildren because your brother's done that. More than that, I'm not even asking you to settle down with a nice girl, I know you swing both ways." He winced at his mother's precise perfect diction as she used the colloquialism. "I am simply after seeing you settled down with someone."

"But . . . Set 'em Up?" he asked as he stared at the computer behind her. "What . . . it's . . ."

The glare never wavered. "It's a site for parents like myself, who want to find someone for their children. You need the help, Stephen."

"Nick doesn't seem to think so," he muttered.

Doreen rolled her eyes. "Your boss is hardly a man with a reasoned grasp of anything to do with interpersonal relations, and if you're referring to that ridiculous moniker that's been coined, I want you to know that I resent it strongly on your behalf."

Stephen stared as his mother tapped away, describing him in ridiculously overblown fashion, adding in a few photos from family vacations that had been taken without his knowledge, of him dressed only in his swim trunks. "When were those taken?"

"The last time William talked you into joining him at the cottage in the Lake District."

"Mum. Please. Just let me do this on my own-"

Her voice was sharp, even as she didn't turn away from the computer. The words, 'Well fit and athletic,' leapt out from the screen at him. "I _have_left you to it. I have left you to it long enough. I am taking things into my own hands."

He threw his hands in the air and left her to it.

Stephen thought the ARC would at least let him escape from that. He was wrong. The moment he got there, he saw Connor huddled into a corner, looking miserable, while Abby and Jenny giggled and looked at something on the young man's laptop. Connor's face was pathetically eager as he said, "Stephen! Hi! Do you need help with something? Anything? Please?" Clearly things were past the point of tolerance if Connor didn't even care about pretending he wasn't looking for an escape.

Nonetheless, he tested anyhow. "You need to work on your shooting, and you've been lax at your fitness, you know."

"You'll spot, great!" Connor rambled at speed as he snatched the computer away from the two women. "I'll go get changed." He sprinted off.

It was the first time Connor had put effort into the training, and with that he showed an actual improvement. Stephen knew it was bad, though, when Connor was beginning to stumble with tiredness, but wouldn't stop with a sort of dogged fear of being anywhere else. "What am I protecting you from?" Stephen finally asked.

"Abby and Jenny. It's my Mum. She's after getting me settled down and I should never have got her set up with the internet," Connor moaned.

Stephen blanched. "Is it that web site? The one where parents try to set up their children?"

Connor looked at him, then said in shrewd sympathy, "You too?"

"Were Abby and Jenny looking at the pictures posted of you?" he asked, wondering.

The geek frowned. "No," he grumbled. "Mum's been sending me photos from the site, trying to . . . I dunno. Tempt me or something. It's disturbing. Like she's a pimp or something."

"My mother's dredging up any pictures she can of me without a shirt on," Stephen said. "I'm never taking a weekend at my brother's cottage again."

"Mine's offering tickets to the Arsenal Liverpool match upcoming as a first date if someone'll go with me," Connor said. "I don't even know where she got them from."

"You win," Stephen said. "Outright bribery."

The younger man snorted. "Please. At least with you no one has to be bribed. Me, people take one look at me and just laugh."

Without any way to respond to that without being either trite or insulting, Stephen said, "So, Abby and Jenny are taking the mick are they?" He hauled Connor to his feet and pointed him toward the change room.

"That and they're looking at the pictures in my email," Connor said, heaving a sigh. "They're all quite nice to look at, but the fact that my mum picked them out . . ." he shuddered.

Stephen pictured getting emails of attractive men from his mother and shuddered at the thought himself. "If you want to work in my office today," he offered, "You can hide there."

"Thank you!" Connor grinned. "You're a good friend."

Next weekend he was to have lunch with his mother. He waited at the little outdoor cafe, only to be approached by a man his own age, saying, "Stephen Hart? My name's Brian Fairchild. I was told-"

Stephen felt his eyes bulge. "I'm going to kill you, mother," he muttered.

"I beg your pardon?" said the man, who was the worst sort of stereotype academic. Tweed and a silly bowtie included.

Trying not to make a scene, Stephen grated out. "Tell me this isn't a blind date."

"Well, I . . . that is, the arrangements . . ." under Stephen's furious glare he quailed and mumbled, "Yes."

He stood and stormed off, planning to give his mother a piece of his mind as soon as he was home and in private. He was at a stoplight, waiting impatiently for the light to change, when suddenly the door to the car opened and shut, and suddenly Connor was sitting next to him, scrunched into a ball, clearly trying to hide. "What the hell?" he asked.

"Please don't make me go back there," Connor pleaded. "Stephen, please. My mum set me up on a date and . . . please." He looked pathetic and Stephen made out a very large man in a rugby jersey making his way out of the pub next to the car. "Oh God," Connor muttered, ducking lower.

The light changed, and Stephen, not really up to arguing about it, kept driving. "The man with the Leeds jersey was your blind date?" Stephen asked, feeling no little bit dazed. The man was _built_like a rhino. There had to be some irony there.

"Mum knows I like football and somehow came to the idea that it's sports generally. And then . . ." Connor waved a hand in the air.

"I was just heading home. My mother skipped out on our lunch date and sent some . . ." he shook his head in disbelief.

As they pulled up to his flat, Connor hopped out of the car. "Thank you for the rescue Stephen. Let me know if I can pay you back, somehow."

Connor headed off to do whatever he did in his free time, and Stephen headed up to his flat and promptly phoned his mother. "Hello?"

"I'm never trusting you again," he told her.

She sighed voluminously. "Stephen, really."

"You said I was meeting you for lunch, instead you sent that . . . that . . . poindexter-"

"He sounded like a very nice young man," she interrupted.

"He was the worst sort of stereotype of an academic and you probably knew it," Stephen growled. "Leave my personal life alone."

"You don't have a personal life, you have that girl Allison that you shag whenever she reappears from the rainforest," his mother replied tartly.

He sighed, feeling a headache coming on. "Must you make it sound so sordid?"

The next week at the ARC was clearly a misery for Connor, and Stephen was just happy none of the others knew that he was in the same boat as Connor. Instead, he let Connor hide from Abby at his flat, hide from Jenny and Lester in his office and hide from Cutter at the obstacle course and gun range (which had the added benefit of forcing Connor to actually do the training he was supposed to do).

Connor returned this favour by debugging and fixing every electronic item Stephen owned, he'd never known his home computer could _do_that, detailing and fixing Stephen's car, which had made funny clunking noises ever since he'd had to hide in it from a rampaging iguanodon, and indulging Stephen's hidden weakness for Mario Bros. the original.

"I can't believe you never found the warp zone," Connor said disapprovingly.

Stephen was gritting his teeth as he played through level six, grumbling to himself about the ease with which Connor had drifted through it. "Do you mind? I'm trying to concentrate."

"You never finished, did you?" Connor asked, ignoring Stephen's desire to focus on dodging the turtle-things and the mushroom things and not miss his jumps over the bottomless pits. "Watch out for the goomba . . . oh well," Connor said as the annoying music indicating he'd died, again, played.

Then, because Connor had the look of a nuclear physicist being asked to do year one maths problems, he agreed to let Connor break out his Xbox and discovered Battlefield: Bad Company was a game that he'd never in a million years be any good at, because there were more than ten buttons on the controller, and it was like being in real life, only instead of just controlling yourself, you had to remember to push what felt like a dozen buttons to move around and shoot things. On top of which, video game logic still applied, so no matter what happened, he had no idea what was happening.

The next time Connor was hiding out, Stephen had his weekend pickup football game on, and brought Connor with. His football teammates were suitably sympathetic (meaning, not really at all, but eventually shut up about it, which was one better than the ARC) and let Connor drift from position to position, trying to find somewhere he wouldn't bollix up the game. He was no good at scoring or defending but when he wound up in goal, he really wasn't bad. Needed some practice to be actually good, but he wasn't terrible, and better than some. More than that, what Connor lacked in physical skill, he more than made up for in the pub after, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of football trivia that seemed to rival his dinosaur data.

Connor seemed rather awed by the fact that he'd got along with Stephen's friends, confiding that, "When I was in school all the rugby players used to drop me into the skip in back of the school, so I just avoided the sports players completely."

Wincing, because that would have made a wreck out of anyone, Stephen said, "Well, at least that part of your life is over."

"Until Mum sends me another rugby player," Connor grumbled.

The next week they were both beleaguered as both their mothers sent wave after wave of potential love interests their way. Connor likened it to waves of zombies in computer games, and Stephen couldn't honestly disagree. Not even his flat was safe now, and he'd hidden out at Connor and Abby's for a while until Abby's glee at discovering this (and passing the information along to Jenny who told _everyone_) made that too, intolerable.

An Australian saltwater crocodile in the Royal Botanical Gardens that had come through an anomaly was quite bad enough, but Stephen felt his heart stop when Connor flung himself into the path of the reptile to shove one of the civilians out of the way. "Connor!"

With an impressive alacrity Connor rolled out of the path of the snapping jaws, then stupidly flung himself onto the animal, wrapping his arms around it's snout to pin the mouth closed, letting the fleeing people get on with getting away. Then the croc thrashed, sending Connor flying into the fountain, and Stephen was cursing as he finally had his clear shot with the ketamine darts.

He raced down to where Connor was pulling himself out of the water. "Nice shooting," he told Stephen admiringly.

"Don't do that again!" Stephen snapped hoarsely, then surprised even himself by kissing Connor, who made a questioning noise into his mouth, then seemed to shrug and happily go along with it.

"Well, if you'd just told me you had a boyfriend, Stephen, I wouldn't have been on that website at all," said a dishearteningly familiar voice at the same time as another woman spoke.

"Connor," she said with the same accent as the geek, "I really wish you'd have told me you'd found someone. And such a nice someone."

Stephen saw his own horror reflected in Connor's eyes as they pulled away.

His mother turned. "Oh, is that one your son?" she addressed the woman who could only be Connor's mother.

"Yes," said the woman with a gossipy air. "I'd been hoping I could get Conn to find himself a nice someone when it because clear his roommate was just a boondoggle."

Connor turned to him. "We should seriously consider running away somewhere else," he said conversationally. "I hear the Alberta Badlands are really excellent for dinosaur research."

"Not a bad idea," Stephen said, eyeing Abby and Jenny who seemed to be planning to approach the two gossiping mothers, and Nick, who had a hand over his mouth to stifle laughter.

"It's an excellent idea," Connor's mother said. "You know, I heard they legalised gay marriage over in Canada."

"Yes," said his own mother, "It would streamline things immensely."

"Mum!" cried two voices as one.


End file.
